In response to Causal Universes
Comment author: Emily 28 November 2012 01:13:56PM 11 points [-]

There's causality anywhere there's a noun, a verb, and a subject: 'Dumbledore's wand lifted the rock.'

This is a rather confused use of some linguistic terminology. I think "a subject, a verb, and an object" is probably what was intended. (It's worth noting that in academic syntax these terms are somewhat deprecated and don't necessarily have useful meanings. I think the casual meanings are still clear enough in informal contexts like this though.)

Beyond the terminology issue, I'm unconvinced by the actual claim here. Arguments from linguistic usage often turn out to be very bad on scrutiny, and I'm not sure this one holds up too well. What about 'Quirrell secretly followed Harry.'? Seems like a much weaker assertion that Quirrell is causally affecting Harry in some way here. I expect there are more obvious examples - that one took me 10 seconds to come up with.

In response to comment by Emily on Causal Universes
Comment author: illicitlearning 28 November 2012 07:57:18PM 2 points [-]

There are plenty of sentences that have a noun, a verb, and a subject without having an agent - anything in passive voice or any unaccusative will do the trick. I suspect the argument would be even better worded using semantic roles rather than syntactic categories, eg: "Causality exists when there is an event with an agent". This isn't a very interesting thing to say though, because "agent" is a casual semantic role and so relies on causality existing by definition. You literally cannot have an event with an agent unless there is causality.

In response to Causal Universes
Comment author: illicitlearning 28 November 2012 04:20:45PM 12 points [-]

Sometimes I still marvel about how in most time-travel stories nobody thinks of this. I guess it really is true that only people who are sensitized to 'thinking about existential risk' even notice when a world ends, or when billions of people are extinguished and replaced by slightly different versions of themselves. But then almost nobody will notice that sort of thing inside their fiction if the characters all act like it's okay.)

The only story I've seen directly address this issue at all is Homestuck, in which any timeline that splits off from the 'alpha' timeline is 'doomed' and ceases to exist once it diverges too far from the alpha. The three characters with time traveling capabilities are someone who is extremely careful to avoid creating doomed timelines, one who is nihilistically apathetic about death and creates doomed timelines willy-nilly, and one who is a psychopathic monster bent on using his powers for destruction. Several times, main characters are shown experiencing existential despair over the idea that their own timeline might be a doomed one, and at one point a character with time-traveling capabilities realizes that the only way to prevent the destruction of the universe is to travel back in time, leaving his current timeline doomed. His realization of the implications of dooming that timeline and his efforts to somehow save his timeline's version of his only surviving friend were particularly poignant (to me, at least).

Comment author: illicitlearning 29 July 2011 08:11:01PM 2 points [-]

I hope to come. If anyone would like to carpool from North Park, let me know.

Comment author: David_Gerard 18 April 2011 08:09:28PM *  4 points [-]

Every time I went in to take a class it was always hard to find people to pair with, because of the odd hours I went to take classes.

That's because Scientology has had the crap beaten out of it by the Internet and Scientology "orgs" are largely ghost towns at any hour of the day since the mid-1990s, not just when you went. Even in Los Angeles.

Also, kids take these classes, too. They're not adult-only classes. Her parents are Scientologists and they were training their kid in their religion.

Uh, Luke. That would have been a Sea Org member's kid. They brought her in especially for you. You don't seem to want to accept the designed purpose the TRs were written for: to draw people further in.

Comment author: illicitlearning 19 April 2011 06:38:21PM 13 points [-]

I was at one point a 14 year old girl taking a Scientology Communications course, brought there by my father to train me in his religion. While I certainly can't speak for all of the children in all Scientology classes, most of the other children there that I hung out with were also brought there by their parents to be trained in Scientology.

It seems plausible to me that if there happened to be a 12 year old girl in lukeprog's class, they would have paired them together for that part of the class specifically because it would create an uncomfortable, "creepy" situation. Developing the ability to react unflinchingly to that sort of situation is pretty much the point of the exercise. (As an example, they paired me with a grandmotherly older woman for a different exercise: bullbaiting. She was certainly not the sort of person who I was comfortable trying to provoke a reaction from or had an easy time remaining stoic to.)

But it seems unlikely to me that the people at the Org I went to, at least, would have gone to the extent of enlisting their daughters in the class specifically to make one man feel uncomfortable, as you seem to be proposing.